ISHCMC Food for Thought

Dear all,

Hope you all had a good relaxing Tet and are ready to return fully energized for Semester 2.

In an earlier Food for Thought I referred to the work of Angela Duckworth on resilience and hence when I read this article I thought that I should share it because it is a piece of research that many of us teachers have read about or referred to when we are discussing or thinking about how self-control and delaying gratification are markers that have been shown to point to students being successful in their futures.

We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.

“In a series of famous experiments in the 1960s and ’70s conducted by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel, preschoolers were invited to sit alone in a room furnished only with a small desk. On the desk sat two marshmallows (or equivalently tempting treats) and a bell. The researcher told each child that he had to leave, but that when he returned, she could eat both marshmallows. If she wanted one marshmallow before then, however, she could ring the bell and eat one, but not both. Then the researcher shut the door, leaving the child alone with the forbidden marshmallows.

Some children gobbled a marshmallow the minute the door was closed, while others distracted themselves by covering their eyes, singing and kicking the desk. One resourceful child somehow managed to take a nap. But here’s the part that made the experiment famous: In follow-up studies, children who had resisted temptation turned out years later to be not only skinnier and better socially adapted, but they also scored as much as 210 points higher on their SATs than the most impatient children in the studies did.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/magazine/we-didnt-eat-the-marshmallow-the-marshmallow-ate-us.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=2